The first step to making nitrous oxide was making ammonium nitrate. The straightforward way to do that is to just mix the two materials. However, given they're an acid and base, that reaction would likely be too exothermic to simply mix them. Instead, I went with a method of using a water bath around a reacting chamber, and actively cooling the water through a radiator. In the reacting chamber, I slowly dripped ammonia into the reacting chamber, and when it stopped actively reacting on drops, I would occasionally sample the liquid and use solid calcium carbonate as a base to check if it's mostly reacted.

Once the reaction has pretty much completed, I evaporated off the water with some heat until I was left with ammonium nitrate salt. A large issue with the methods I'm using here is that it requires some form of both pulverization and drying for the ammonium nitrate salts. Ammonium nitrate is explosive, and while it's not the most sensitive explosive, it's still dangerous to pulverize and heat it. There are methods to dry it differently, but taking even more time to develop those right now is out of the question. After we've properly produced nitrous oxide and are confident that it works on the eagles, I can come back to make the process safer.

Getting the exact ratio of our ammonia to our nitric acid took 4 days, and processing the ammonium nitrate took another 2. From there, upscaling the production volume took another 8 days. The next process I need to work on is the production of nitrous oxide from the ammonium nitrate. For that, I'm going to make a blast proof area for working, because I'm almost certainly going to be destroying a lot of equipment before I've narrowed down what I need.

Making nitrous oxide was a lot more difficult than I thought it would be. I'd mentioned the explosive danger of ammonium nitrate, but actually being present in that situation was an entirely different story. Over the course of 122 days, I basically injured myself every nine or ten days in some kind of explosion related incident. All of the injuries were minor, small glass cuts or hot oil splatter on my arms were the majority of the injuries. I'd put up a thick glass shield to protect most of my body, but my hands still needed to be near the reaction for me to properly manage things.

The main issue I ran into was that the reaction requires some amount of heat to get started, but it's exothermic, so from then on, it starts producing heat, and running away until the ammonium nitrate would explode. Since I need to actually collect the gasses, I was using a water based one-way gas valve, which also meant that when an explosion occurred, the small valve couldn't handle the rapid gas release, and the reaction chamber would break.

Sometimes it broke catastrophically and sent shrapnel out. Most times, it just broke and splashed in the hot oil, throwing it everywhere. In either situation, what I found was that I needed a way to regulate temperature in both directions for this process. Unfortunately, the temperature where the reaction actually moves forward also gets dangerously close to the smoke point of the plant oils we're using.

On one hand, once I figured that out the number of accidents occurring reduced drastically because I could pull away and shield myself the second I noticed smoke forming. On the other hand, it means that we're operating at the upper edge of the oil's workable range, meaning it'll need replaced fairly frequently.

I found that once the temperature reached about 340F, the heat crystal needed to be removed. Then, at 360F we needed to begin actively cooling oil by pumping it through an active cooling heat pump in the form of a mana engine and a radiator. If the radiator overcooled, the pump would turn off, and the oil temperature could rise again. I had to redesign the reaction chamber a few times to better allow heat transfer between the oil and solid ammonium nitrate inside, but eventually I came up with a good design with multiple internal ridges that maximized surface area for heat transfer.

From there, I once again utilized ground birds as test subjects for the gases. It's unfortunate, but a few of them perished in testing over the course of my experiments. However, in the 40 days following my initial experiments, I got quite good at knocking the birds out for a few hours by utilizing different amounts of ether, nitrous oxide, and pure oxygen gas. By the end of it, the birds would come out of their anesthesia after a few hours, and then within thirty minutes or so began behaving normally again.

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So, I was left with the task of upscaling the nitrous oxide production to a larger level to actually be able to accommodate the sheer size of the eagles. Given the explosive risk involved, I think I'm going to upscale by making multiple small apparatuses, rather than one large one. The small apparatus still has a minor failure rate due to the imprecise nature of the controls on it, so building more of them is much safer than trying to upscale and risking massive explosions. Long term, it's something I could consider returning to work on, but for now this is the plan.

As I was upscaling the production of nitrous oxide, I had a realization that actually getting the gas where it needed to be, and making it usable could be a problem. Unlike the ground birds which were stationary, the eagles are going to be moved over the course of many hours. As such, some kind of cart apparatus will be necessary for transporting the gas mixtures and regulating their release into some kind of mask to direct the flow into the eagle's lungs.

That was a bit of a difficult problem. Storing it was a fairly straightforward process of making cylindrical storage containers that could be filled by bubbling the gas into the container with a large piston for compression. To seal it, I needed a method that would allow pressure release when I wanted it. I decided to go with a lead screw plug that could be twisted past a hole that can release pressure. It only reseals a few times though before we need a new plug.

I then went with a larger regulating chamber to reduce the harsh pressures involved with releasing pressurized gas. Ultimately, I got some inspiration from Tiberius for how to handle regulating the gas. He recommended using fish swim bladders as a pressure regulator. I wouldn't have thought of that, but it's a fairly elastic balloon. We'll need a constant supply of fairly large bladders, since they'll break down over time, but it's doable. Somewhat disgustingly, he also recommended treating intestines from our barkas and layering those together to form gas-tight, flexible tubing for the final stretch after the swim bladders. Those can be more adequately processed and treated to prevent decay, and we have a steady supply of the intestines, which until now were basically recycled in the mushroom growing areas underground as part of reprocessing waste materials.

Overall, the final design I came up with was a moderate sized cart that could hold a few containers of pressurized gas. Those go into a mixing chamber, which then goes through a swim bladder regulator and through a barkas intestine until it reaches a leather mask. The leather isn't gas tight, but it should direct most of the gas into the lungs of the eagle, while still letting it exhale to remove waste gasses from it's lungs. The whole design allows the hot swapping of tanks of gas so we can constantly resupply as we travel, and the cart has both wheels and carrying poles so it can be transported through rough terrain as needed.

We're in the final stretch now. I finished with the nitrous oxide production lines and training some demons to manage it after an additional 40 days, and then designed the cart apparatus in another 30. Based on my tectonic sense measurements in the crystal growth apparatus, we're about five months from being done with growing the large mana crystal. The bathhouse is complete now, and we've build a lot of artificial eagles nests. I want to take some time getting the city in the right mindset for what's to come now.

There are a lot of unknowns with installing a crystal this size. On one hand, history seems to show that a crystal this size shouldn't shatter due to a mana storm, which is why we grew it this size. On the other hand, it clearly attracted a lot of eagles to the dwarven capitol. It seemed to drive the leviathans away from our island, or at least away from the area between our island and the mainland before, but that was with smaller sized mana crystals. I'm unsure as to what might happen with a larger one. We should experience better crop yields and a higher quality of life from it though, and the artificial tide pools had better yields when we previously had mana crystals, so I'm hoping that continues to be the case.

I think I'm most looking forward to the much higher construction rates that we might find. It's unfortunate that we didn't find any more mana crystal deposits while mining so far. I'll have to go through with tectonic sense again to see if they missed any. I don't think we'll stop growing mana crystals when this one finishes, given their usefulness, so it still can't hurt to find more now.

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